George Way has about 40 Old Master portraits, two banquet tables, 38 Charles II and William and Mary chairs, a dozen Jacobean chests and cupboards, eight Bible boxes and a 9-foot-high Elizabethan canopy bed.
All in all, an English castle`s worth of furnishings.
His castle, however, is a small one-bedroom apartment in the Silver Lake area of Staten Island.
”Pretty insane, isn`t it?” asked Way, not really expecting his visitors to demur.
Anyway, they were preoccupied maneuvering through the crowded 2 1/2 rooms, which were filled to bursting with late-16th to early-18th Century furniture, paintings and accessories.
”Don`t worry,” Way said. ”The things have been around for hundreds of years. They`re here to be lived with.”
That is just what Way has been doing for 18 years, when he is not behind the delicatessen counter of a Pathmark supermarket in the Westerleigh section of Staten Island.
”This is fun-it`s my love,” said Way, 40, who for 10 years has been a consultant to Christie`s East on early English furniture.
The periods Way collects, he said, range ”through Elizabeth I, James I, Charles I, Oliver Cromwell-he was rotten; he melted all the silver down-then Charles II, James III and William and Mary. Just call this England in America.”
Some people have.
When Michael and Julie Nowicki of Short Hills, N.J., could not afford to go to London, they celebrated their 21st wedding anniversary with a weekend as Way`s guests and sleeping in his four-poster bed.
A local police officer asked Way if she could be photographed in his apartment in her Victorian wedding gown.
”Of course I said yes,” said Way.
”She was tickled pink. I didn`t charge her. But I did turn down a television commercial; I just didn`t think there was enough room.”
A problem of space
He may have been right. He has had to store a Charles II daybed at a friend`s house, and he gave himself some extra space by agreeing to exhibit 20 of his Charles II chairs at the Pennsbury Manor Museum in Morrisville, Pa. He keeps most of his silver in a bank vault.
Way often dreams, he says, of moving to an English Tudor or stone house, perhaps in Westchester County, N.Y., where all his treasures could cohabit.
”I want to have my own museum and a place that would be easy for people to get to,” he said.
When he was 8, he happened upon a pewter button while walking around Valley Forge.
”It could have belonged to one of George Washington`s military men,” he said.
His obsession with furniture began when he was about 16 and found a beatup chair, carved with lions, in the basement of the church his family attended.
”I thought it was the oldest chair in the world,” he said. He recalled pestering the parish priest into letting him buy the chair and getting nowhere until a few months later when the priest offered it to him for $50.
”I flew to the church and bought it,” he said. ”To this day I can`t remember how I got the money.”
At about the same time, Way started visiting the furniture collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Historical Society.
”At the Met I would go mainly to the Pilgrim room,” he said. ”I had a flashlight, and the guards would let me crawl around under the furniture and help me turn chairs upside down.”
At the historical society, Way would admire the period rooms, especially the William and Mary exhibit.
”It was just so courtly that I`d think, `This is the kind of environment I`d like to live in. Actually, it`s just about what I have now. In fact, I`ve surpassed those rooms.”
Way also ascribes his special interest in early English furnishings to Vincent Price movies, one of his favorite things as a child.
”They did a lot of castles,” Way said. ”I didn`t really care about the plots. The furniture and background scenes were my thing.”
Way said he never had paid more than $1,500 for a painting or $1,000 for a piece of furniture and that he found most of his furniture in Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights antiques shops.
”This kind of stuff has been out of fashion since the `20s,” he said.
”There are not too many people who can tell a reproduction from a real piece. I can tell something a mile away. I taught myself everything I know.” Spoon is jackpot
A few weeks ago, Way hit the jackpot at the flea market on 26th Street in Manhattan.
”I was there early,” he recalled, ”and saw right away that it was a late 17th Century silver spoon.”
The dealer asked for $20.
”I grabbed it,” Way said, speaking of the offer.
He used the spoon for his morning coffee until he saw a similar spoon on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Soon he was able to date his spoon to 1685; he concluded, by its hallmarks, that the silversmith had been Jesse Kip of New York.
”Now I`ve been asked to lend it to a museum,” Way said.
The only deterrent to Way`s acquisitiveness seems to be condition. He calls himself a purist.
”I like to buy things in excellent condition,” he said. ”If it`s been restored, it`s a no.”
Ten years ago, Way`s mother bought him a ticket to England so he could see where all the furniture had come from.
”If I give you the money,” his mother told him, ”you`ll just go and buy another antique; so go to London instead.”
He went straight to the Victoria and Albert Museum.
”That was really something,” he said. ”Heaven. Home sweet home for me. It even inspired me more. I started feeling I was in competition with England.”
And so, Way said, he devotes every spare minute to antiques-hunting.
”You have to go every week,” he said. ”Things keep popping up.”
The bedroom is dominated by what he called his Oh-My-God bed:
”That`s what people say when they come in here. The elaborately carved Elizabethan bed has a paneled tester that grazes the ceiling, which is just over 9 feet from the floor.
”When I got it home I noticed the initials E and R on the headboard,”
Way told his visitors. ”I then found out that the coat of arms-a lion and a dragon supporting the Order of the Garter-was Elizabeth I`s.” He said the bed dated approximately to 1570.
Way takes his breakfast sitting on a mid-17th Century settle that he pulls up to an Elizabethan trestle table, circa 1575.
”It has a lift-top seat, for swords or storage,” he said. Nearby is a late-16th Century cupboard, with the original lock and keys, which is heavily gadrooned.
Way said there was ”nothing modern in this place,” but he is not one to live in the past.
A Victorian wrought-iron lamp helps brighten the bedroom, and until Way can come across the right fixtures for the living room, he said, he`s making do with 19th Century brass chandeliers.
Antique portraits are a special part of his collection.
”I love portraits because the people are wearing the costumes of the period,” he said. ”And it`s nice to have them in the setting they lived in.”
The portraits of earls, duchesses and assorted nobles include a sculpted oak bust of Charles I.
”I found it in a shop in Greenwich Village and knew right away who it was,” the collector said. ”You just get familiar with the faces, and the kings and queens become like family. I love waxing him, especially his nose.” Large paintings are hung frame to frame along the walls.
”That`s Queen Elizabeth I,” Way said of the bejeweled woman near the bed. To her left is a portrait he identified as Nicholas Rockox, a friend of the painter Rubens, that matched an early-17th Century engraving he had found. The living-room walls are hung with more members of his extended royal family, among them an early 18th Century portrait of Queen Anne and a large painting of a 17th Century English lady.
”She`s dripping pearls, and I think she`s Frances Stewart, Duchess of Richmond,” Way said. ”I found her in Brooklyn and took her home on the bus.”
Come March, all the portraits will be joining Way`s chairs at the Pennsbury Manor Museum.
Way has mixed feelings about that: ”It`s great that lots of people will be able to see them, but I`m really, really going to miss them.”
